High-quality bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) are essential for efficient ray tracing on a graphics processing unit (GPU). Conventional techniques for constructing BVHs can be divided into two categories:                1. Central processing unit (CPU)-based techniques that produce high-quality BVHs that are capable of supporting fast ray casts, but take very long to construct a BVH. The CPU-based techniques work well in situations where the scene remains static; the BVH has to be constructed only once, and the construction can be done offline.        2. GPU-based techniques that construct a BVH quickly, but produce unacceptably low-quality BVHs. The GPU-based techniques work well with animated scenes, but only if the number of ray casts per frame is low enough for BVH quality to be of little importance.        
One problem is that there are use cases, including product and architecture design as well as movie rendering, for which none of the existing techniques is a good fit: the CPU-based techniques are too slow for constructing a new BVH every frame, whereas the GPU-based techniques do not yield high enough BVH quality.
Thus, there is a need for addressing the issue of BVH generation and/or other issues associated with the prior art.